It’s a good thing, I think, that there are people whose job is to figure out how we move forward into a sustainable and resilient future for humanity from the place we’re in now.
I hope they’re good at that job, and good at convincing other people to join them.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
How ‘Cultural Evolution’ Can Give Us the Tools to Build Global-Scale Resilience http://suhub.co/2Fmo0rw
I did not, in fact, know these things.
Originally shared by Mary Ann Bernal
As someone who values becoming right over proving that I was right, and who doesn’t identify strongly with labels or tribes, this makes some sense to me: most people aren’t like that.
Originally shared by Neuroscience News
How Political Parties Influence Our Belief, and What We Can Do About It
Psychologists suggest that valuing our identity more than our accuracy is what leads us to accept incorrect information that aligns with our political party’s beliefs. This value discrepancy, they say, can explain why high-quality news sources are no longer enough–and understanding it can help us find better strategies to bridge the political divide.
The research is in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. (full open access)
A tool to identify tools.
Originally shared by ****
Find out If You Are Arguing with a Bot on Twitter with Make Adverbs Great Again
Clearly, there’s no way that this could possibly go wrong.
Given that a simple error in an Excel spreadsheet helped to spread the myth that prosperity could be attained through austerity (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/microsoft-excel-the-ruiner-of-global-economies/).
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
The Democratization of AI Is Putting Powerful Tools in the Hands of Non-Experts http://suhub.co/2obpYDL
Humanoid robots, in many ways, don’t make a lot of sense. For almost every conceivable application, using humans instead gives better results – except, of course, in cases where it would be abusive to use humans, in which case there are other kinds of concern about why you’re even doing that thing, and whether you should be doing it to something that closely resembles a human.
Be that as it may, the idea of humanoid robots is a powerful one, and there are people working to produce them – hoping, perhaps, to learn more about humanity in the process?
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
What Roboticists Are Learning From Early Generations of Lifelike Humanoid Robots http://suhub.co/2Gqbs1z
How do you get to understand – and then alter – the genome of yeast?
By rebuilding it from scratch, with some hooks built in to make it programmable. What we sometimes call “enhancement points” in the ERP world.
And once you’ve done that, what can you do with yeast? Well, besides its traditional applications in making beer and bread, it’s already used to produce medicines and other useful biologicals.
I’m well aware, of course, that language changes; I studied English language for my master’s, after all, including Old English and Middle English. I know that change is inevitable, and resisting it is futile.
At the same time, I advise people who are writing today to know and follow today’s conventions – by which I mean the conventions followed by today’s most skilled writers. I posted a piece a little while back about the five errors I see most frequently in published fiction: missing past perfect tense, “may” instead of “might” in past tense free indirect speech, over-application of the coordinate comma, missing the vocative comma, and missing or (more frequently) misplacing the apostrophe.
All of those are conventions. They’ve been different in the past – in some cases, the not particularly distant past – and will doubtless be different in the future, should we last so long. But if you don’t use the conventions because you don’t know the conventions, you don’t look as professional as the people who do.
And then there are matters of clarity. If you use “enormity” to mean “enormousness”, you now have two words that mean the same thing instead of meaning very different things, and you’ve lost the ability to mean the first thing without some extra contextual cues that tell your readers that’s actually what you mean. If you dangle your modifiers, you not only reveal that your thinking is a bit fuzzy; you risk making a seriously-intended piece ridiculous, which will distract readers from your point. If you use “alright” instead of “all right”, at least some readers will object (even though that’s a change that’s probably now inevitable, and will join “altogether” and “anymore” in the category of “compressed words that mean something subtly different from the uncompressed version”).
I suppose my point is: think about language. Be aware of it. If you’re a writer, it’s both your tool and your medium, just as brushes and paint are for an artist. Be aware of what your language is doing and what it’s conveying about you to various groups of readers. Don’t just slap it on any old way; think about the brushstrokes and the colour wheel.
But don’t obsess about the brushstrokes, or insist on only using the ones that appear in classic paintings, and none of your newfangled acrylics, either, and my art teacher when I was nine years old never let me do X, and…
If you’re an editor, or a book reviewer, I believe you have a form of professional responsibility and also an explicit or implicit invitation (respectively) to critique an author’s usage as well as their style, craft, and other choices. If they’re offering a product for sale, it should be professionally prepared to the best of their ability, and following current conventions is part of that. Otherwise, try not to get too wound up about other people’s brushstrokes. There are more important things; and some of the strokes are changing, whether you like it or not.
Originally shared by Karen Conlin
An excellent post, as always, from my colleague James Harbeck.
These are good tips. One that I used to use when I was a copy editor that I’ve never seen anyone else mention: read upside down. It’s another way of slowing yourself down so that you see what’s actually on the page.
Personally, I don’t print my manuscripts, but I do send them to my Kindle for at least one of my proofreads.
Originally shared by Grammar Girl
It’s human to make mistakes, but these computer and printing tricks can help you catch your typos. http://ow.ly/iHBa30isK3l
So, how did Singularity University grow its female participation rate so effectively, and help multiple women begin start-ups?
Primarily, it seems, by helping them to feel both safe and valued.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Unleashing Some of the Most Ambitious Women on the Planet http://suhub.co/2Elt2mJ